Stephen Mullen, a highly regarded historian specialising in Scotland's links with Atlantic slavery, objects to a right wing scholar's flagrant misrepresentation of his own work and that of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum's curators in @thetimes.com alanlester.co.uk/blog/falsify...

Can literature’s ‘what if’ questions help us reset our relationship with money? Dive into speculative fiction and the emerging field of the Economic Humanities in the new episode of Beyond the Books ft. Paul Crosthwaite, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature. Full ep: youtu.be/hWlrWuaz5IQ

@ucuedinburgh.bsky.social FIRST DAY OF WELCOME WEEK STRIKE ACTION ‼️#StopTheCuts

Today is the first of 5 strike days by @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social #DefendEveryJob www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/welcome-week...

Busy @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social picket lines this morning at Edinburgh University with staff striking to defend jobs and oppose the biggest cuts seen in Scottish higher education #SaveHE #NoCompulsoryRedundancies #StopTheCuts

More pictures of our determined picket lines! Keep them coming! #UCU #StopTheCuts

Striking today to stop jobs cuts at the University of Edinburgh. It is a manufactured crisis. There is no deficit. #stopmassredundancies

Edinburgh Staff are determined to #StopTheCuts! #SaveHE #NoCompulsoryRedundancies

Central Italy says Free Palestine

My book is available for preorder @melvillehouse.bsky.social! It’s about The Hite Report—the 50M-copy feminist sexology bestseller—its wild, visionary author Shere Hite and culture wars then and now. Out April '26! mhpbooks.com/books/the-bo...

Very exciting book news from Rosa Campbell, one-time editorial fellow at History Workshop 📖 👀

My first piece in the TLS — a review of a fantastic and pioneering new study of the Paris Commune’s afterlives in Britain and Ireland by @lauracforster.bsky.social www.the-tls.com/history/the-...

This is very good - on Germany’s foul denial of genocide in Gaza, but also on how German education on the Holocaust has shuffled guilt onto Muslims, and erased its own genocides of people other than Jews:

'Dreaming of A Woollen World' by Maya Hall de Bueno: cat follows mouse into woollen paradise/underworld and is rewarded with a fellow being. There is something about this Leonora Carrington-inspired short film that I really love - a kind of feminist fantasy Andy Goldsworthy, on a domestic scale?

pls RT, modernists - CFP now out for 'Weird Modernisms', the collaborative conference between @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social ! July 2026, Loughborough University. www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

Dr Peter Cherry has three questions for you: 1️⃣ Does your research engage with #gender? 2️⃣ Are you a final-year PhD student at a university in Türkiye? 3️⃣ Did you finish your PhD within the last five years at a university in Türkiye? ➖ Appply at biaa.ac.uk/call-for-par...

Apply for my @britishacademy.bsky.social funded International Writing Workshop Researching, Writing and Publishing on Gender, Culture & Society: Upskilling ECRs in Türkiye! Funding available for ECRs outside of Ankara. Deadline for applications: 13 September

That’s all for the first season of Heritage Türkiye…But there will be a second season - so stay tuned!

"Without labor nothing prospers": Sophocles, miners, worker co-operatives, no tips, and Samuel Gompers - labour history and organising in Athens, Ohio.

Further to this @thetls.bsky.social essay about Una Marson's early work as a publisher, the full run of Marson's 1920s/1930s magazine, The Cosmopolitan, is now freely available on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (@dlocaribbean.bsky.social): www.dloc.com/AA00114844/0...

NUJ protest in Edinburgh tomorrow in response to the targeted killing by Israel of the Al Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Noufal - 6 pm, outside Waverley Station.

Belatedly sharing this important (and in fact now urgent) petition calling for a safe route to UK study for students from Gaza: bsky.app/profile/nasa...

Faces of Charleston (a Virginia Woolf Society conference latergram)

My book Teenage Time comes out August 21st from Bloomsbury: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teenage-t... Here it is!

A wonderful piece, that brings us back to apparently old-fashioned ideas like actively working for peace, freedom of conscience – and the primacy of human life, and human rights, over the sanctity of property, and property rights.

For Bastille day, 'Revolution is not simply a word', by Cuban poet Alberto Rocasolano: 'Revolution is [...] the only way of trampling/ cactus memories/ until the future thrusts up a pattern,/ one day squeezed into another.'

The light here nicely capturing my ambivalence about being in Hardy country (can’t stop thinking about the mayor of casterbridge’s frumenty)

Now published, & open access, in ‘The Politics of Book History’, my articlr on the British Library, legacies of slavery, Sloane, and Ted Hughes doi.org/10.36253/jem...

hello. if you work at a university please ask your library to buy my book. it is all about books and libraries and also plants, museums, the Royal Society, and the ways we learn. I think it will be interesting to lots of people, hopefully. thank you www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

You can now listen to the recording here www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcS2... 🎓🌈

Edinburgh branch officers explain why UCU members are going on strike at Edinburgh University this coming Friday #StopTheCuts #solidarity

'Although she has sometimes been dismissed as apolitical, or insufficiently radical to be considered an architect of Jamaican nationalism, Marson saw her role as a literary linchpin to be inherently political.' Anna Girling on Una Marson

Eight years, and still no justice for the 72 people whose lives were taken from them at Grenfell www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

A complete honour to be able to write about Una Marson and her magazine, The Cosmopolitan, for @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-soc... There is so much I didn't get to include, but hopefully this gives a taste of the importance & scope of Marson's Cosmopolitan - in Jamaica, & beyond.

One of the first things you'll see if you visit @ransomcenter.bsky.social (at least for the next few months) is Eugene McCown's portrait of writer, publisher & activist Nancy Cunard. Learn more about the painting's history in this video featuring our Curator of Art, Tracy Bonfitto. #ArtHistory 🎨📜

A taste of last week’s wonderful Neo-Historical Fiction conference at @temporal-communities.de @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social - I came away with so many new ideas, and in awe of all of the important work being done. Thank you @carolinekoegler.bsky.social et al for your fabulous hospitality!

The Biography Shortlist: Michael Hughes, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life Ruby Lal, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan Lamia Ziadé, My Great Arab Melancholy, trans. Emma Ramadan Hanif Kureishi, Shattered Nicholas Jenkins, The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness

The Fiction shortlist: Mark Bowles, All My Precious Madness @galleybeggars.bsky.social Lucas Rijneveld, My Heavenly Favourite, translated by Michele Hutchison @faberbooks.bsky.social Phillip B. Williams, Ours @vikingbooksuk.bsky.social Yasmin Zaher, The Coin @wearefootnote.bsky.social

The shortlists for the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes 2025 have been announced! There are two prizes, in Fiction and Biography, and it's been a pleasure to judge the Fiction prize. www.ed.ac.uk/news/connect...

top tier opening anecdote - from @andrewhartman.bsky.social's much anticipated own magnum opus, Karl Marx in America: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

It could be an April Fool but, apparently, it’s publication day for this wee book. Thanks to all at @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social for bringing it into the world!

#OtD 16 Mar 1884 between 5000-6000 people met at Karl Marx's grave at Highgate Cemetery in London to commemorate the proclamation of the Paris Commune in 1871. No one was allowed past a police force of 500 to get into the cemetery stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8...

Sometimes you buy an old book for teaching & this happens: inscribed by Alain Locke (to who?) in recognition of work 'pour l'Afrique', with letters from Senghor & Souru-Migan Apithy about the 1945 French Constituent Assembly. The practice of diaspora. I want to teach a whole course about this book!

Merry Christmas Man - 1936 (?) Christmas card by Langston Hughes

no there there: Gertrude Stein/ Alice B. Toklas’s (empty) jewellery case

@eleanorfranzen.bsky.social asked and this photo of Ethel Smyth with of one her 5 Old English Sheepdogs, all named Pan, is just too good to hide away in the replies! Smyth had numerous queer relationships & in her 70s fell for Virginia Woolf yet she wrote about the dogs as perhaps her greatest love.

Call for papers! Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum 24th June 2025 at @iashedinburgh.bsky.social, University of Edinburgh CFP below and more details here: www.iash.ed.ac.uk/news/call-pa... Please share!

Hello new Bluesky friends & those who travelled with me from over there, here’re some things I’m thinking abt in my project on the queer history of modern pets: the forgotten links betw lesbian & pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. Features dachshunds! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...